Unsentimality

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This week’s piece for TRB Pro members focuses on how we are going through an unsentimental period across society and in the media business in particular, as unsentimental operators take control of distressed assets. Upgrade to TRB Pro for $200 a year or $20 a month.

First, veteran content marketer Lucas Quagliata on why the vibes are powerful yet rarely enough in a world of spreadsheets. (If you want to contribute to The Rebooting, send me a note at bmorrissey@therebooting.com. I'm interested in including the views of practitioners.)

The limits of vibes

Fake it til you make it. An old adage but honestly not bad advice. When you’re building a media business you need hype. 

To survive, though, you also need a strong business. You can launch without one and you have some runway before you need to be profitable, but you need to bring in revenue to justify your existence. This is true even when you have hype. Remember Quibi? CNN+? Venu? One could listen to the litany of excuses that Jeffery Katzenberg, David Zaslav or uh, (checks notes) David Zaslav could make about each of those endeavors, but the bottom line is they were not bringing in money. 

But vibes and numbers – hype and financial success – are far from mutually exclusive. In fact they can feed into each other quite well. Vibes often translate into numbers, and at the beginning stages of any new business, financial projections are rarely more concrete than the vibes behind them. It works the opposite way too, a project with no hype is much less likely to garner the support it needs to get off the ground, sound business plan or not. 

Unsentimental times

The publication of Graydon Carter’s memoir, When the Going Was Good, arrives at an auspicious time. It evokes the sentimentality of the golden age of media business. There were town cars and bar carts and big expense accounts. Writers were paid very well. Craft mattered. Annie Leibovitz was deployed. And, as Troy noted in our last episode of PvA, these were still good businesses.

Sometimes, it’s good to be sentimental, only we live in unsentimental times.